Taking charge of the crisis

The emergence of the Frankfurt Group.

European Voice

11/9/11, 9:10 PM CET

Updated 4/12/14, 10:12 PM CET

A new eurozone inner core group emerged at the G20 in Cannes: the Frankfurt Group. It comprises Nicolas Sarkozy, France’s president; Angela Merkel, Germany’s chancellor; Christine Lagarde, the managing director of the International Monetary Fund; José Manuel Barroso, the president of the European Commission; Olli Rehn, the European commissioner for economic and monetary affairs; Herman Van Rompuy, the president of the European Council; Jean-Claude Juncker, Luxembourg’s prime minister, who chairs meetings of eurozone finance ministers; and Mario Draghi, the president of the European Central Bank (ECB).

It was this group that harangued the prime minister and finance minister of Greece on 2 November and then held talks in the margins of the G20 over the next two days, inviting Barack Obama, the US president, to join them.

The group already seems to have given itself some formal status; the members wore badges with the words ‘Groupe de Francfort’. The name comes from the impromptu meeting they held at the leaving party for Jean-Claude Trichet, the former president of the ECB, in Frankfurt on 19 October.